intermorphic.com Blog

I spent a bit of time in the last day or so trying to figure out the easiest way, for me, to get an external microphone and guitar audio input into my 2nd gen iPod touch. This was by way of a break from playing with (oops, working on skins for) Mixtikl for iPhone.

As I live not far from a Maplins, I was hoping I could do it with some standard connectors. It turns out I could, but I wanted to make sure I used the minimum number of them so as to keep it as simple as possible. Here is what I found worked for me (item 4 being the adaptor to connect to my guitar jack input, and item 5 the adaptor to connect to my condenser mic).

Here is a picture of the layout:

1) 4-pole 3.5mm Sony “Camcorder” style audio lead, part L53BA for £7.99

2) Two phono to 3.5mm stereo adaptor, part JK14Q for £2.29

3) metal 3.5mm stereo coupler, part JK05F for £1.89

4) 1/4 inch mono to phono adaptor, part RW01B for £1.79

5) 3 pole XLR female to RCA / phono socket, part number N27GB for £8.29

Notes:

I found that the black 3.5mm plug casing on item 1 was a bit too chunky to allow for the iPod touch connector to plug in along side it; so I trimmed a tiny bit of the black plastic off the plug casing where it butted up against the iPod connector, and then tried it again to make sure it was OK (I did not touch the iPod connector of course!) .

My electric guitar connected a treat, and I had a lot of fun with StompVox (what a cool app that is and excellent value!). The input monitoring (i.e. you can hear through headphones the effected signal) was very effective as the audio latency was surprisingly good! I had a lot of fun with the Looper unit in this app, and would recommend it highly to anyone. Although it is billed as a vocal app, I had a lot of fun with it with my guitar.

I then used my Sennheiser E835 mic and got that to be recognised by, and recorded by the QuickVoice app, so that worked OK, too. I then also tried my Takamine steel guitar with line out, but it just did not get detected by QuickVoice, so I need to check into that.

The iPod touch does not have the usual red, white, yellow RCA cable assignments, as I read on the net, but no worry. I found that the yellow and white leads (on the item 1 cable) were for the left and right channels for the headphone output, and the red one worked for mono audio input.

Maplins also do a Panasonic Camcorder lead, which seems to do the same thing, but with different wiring. It looks like the 4-pole plug casing on this one is a bit smaller, but it was not in stock when I went along.

Maplins is a retail electronic component outlet in the UK, probably a bit like Tandy, Radio Shack or Circuit City etc elsewhere.

Hoping this helps some people, as I could not find anything like this when I searched. This may or may not work for you, so I am making no claims to that here! Errors and omissions excepted and use the info at your own risk etc!

Further comment:

Electric guitar not being detected as input: One thing I have found is that some times my electric guitar is not detected sometimes, and by this i mean that when i run one of the above apps you seem to get no input. However, my microphone is always detected – so go figure. Now, it could simply be a loose connection on my side, but I don’t think so. It seems that I have to have the guitar plugged in, and being strummed so it generates a decent signal, before I start the app in order for the guitar input to be detected and the app work (and I can never seem to get it detected if not initially detected). But, I am not even sure of that as there seems to be something temperamental going on. I will investigate further and see if I can get to the bottom of it.

It may seem that we are a bit quieter than normal, but it is just because we have our noses to the grindstone with porting Mixtikl to iPhone. Mixtikl has turned out to have been a huge project for us, and we are so very much looking forward to getting this upcoming rev done and out.

We are continuing to make good progress, but there is still a lot to do before we are ready to release what we are calling Mixtikl V1.5. This will not only have a much nicer, cleaner and easier to use UI, but will also include some significant changes under the hood.

Once Mixtikl V1.5 is out, we will have a portable 12 track music mixing software system that includes the Noatikl generative music engine and the Partikl Synth/MIDI/FX sound engine, and that runs on iPhone/iPod touch, Windows Mobile Smartphone & Pocket PC / PDA, Windows XP/Vista and Mac OSX (and in due course we also hope to get it running, too, on the Antix Game Player). Phew!

We can then also get back to working on Noatikl 2, which we are so looking forward to doing!

best wishes to all our users and customers,

tim

We noted with interest the post at CDM referring to what we, back in 2000, coined “vector audio” – see: Create Digital Music.

It is actually with great happiness that we saw this, and it is thanks to Twitter that it has really come into its own. Back then we had build into Koan what we called “vector audio”, namely the ability (synth) sounds and FX to be described in (XML) text format for the purposes of being sent on/shared by SMS (that was the vision, anyhow). Yes, it was just tokenised parameter values for the various FX/Synth settings, but the idea was that these values could be sent/shared in as little as 1 SMS. Admittedly, our aim was to have the Koan Interactive Audio System embedded on mobiles devices, or used as a plugin in webpages, and we did not forsee Twitter . See: SSEYO web archive at Wayback Machine.

We think it is fantastic that Twitter has provided a viable outlet for this kind of technique. One day we might be able to resurrect this approach in Mixtikl! But, we still have a lot to do before then.